What’d You Do Last Weekend?
With a little extra pastry cream and a simple crepe batter, try your hand at a gateau de crepes, also known as mille crepes.
The Singapore Food Scene
Finally, back and kicking a nasty traveling cold. But boy, was there food, ever food.
Our holiday consisted of 3 days in Singapore, 3 days in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and 4 days back in Singapore. All the time we were sampling, tasting, and marveling at the diversity and abundance of food.
When we first arrived in Singapore, we stayed in a hotel in Little India, near the under-construction location of the Tekka Market, one of the city's largest wet markets. Because it was under construction it had moved to a temporary location a few blocks away, but the temporary location looked as permanent as any market here in the states, so I wouldn't have know the difference. The market was bursting with seafood and fruit we'd never seen before, and we tried to take pictures but not get in the way of the busy morning bustle. I'd heard that was a common complaint at places like Tsukiji - the tourists really interrupted the flow of the market - so we tried to be discreet but still grab some shots.
In the middle of our trip we hit Indonesia, and our focus there was less the food and more two temples - Borobodur and Prambanan. We did have some excellent food at our awesome hotel, the Jogja Village Inn, and a terrific experience eating from a street vendor's cart one afternoon, but so much of our days there were spent hiking all over the temples we barely had time to explore the market. We did sneak over to a spice merchant's stand inside the biggest (and darkest) market on Malioboro, and we picked up a ground spice mixture called rendang, some star anise that smelled like no star anise I'd smelled before, and some cinnamon bark that doesn't appear to be either cassia or canela. I'm investigating it now, but it's a heavy thick wood and smells positively wonderful. I'm picturing rice pudding with lemongrass.
We'd also picked up something they said was cardamom, but from the smell of it, it wasn't cardamom like at all. The pods looked different and smelled spicy, but it was hard to tell with all of the other ambient smells just what we were smelling. Once we got home and looked a little closer, we saw a tiny blue mold on the buds - and tried to dry them out - but realized soon after we were smelling some variety of camphor. Our house was now full of the smell (and the molding buds) and we had to toss the whole lot of it. I'm surprised it made it through customs.
When we got back to Singapore we stayed in a spanking new modern hotel in Chinatown. We had criss-crossed Little India and the Arab Quarter so many times during the first few days in town we felt like we needed to concentrate on Chinatown before we left - and that was a good thing. The hawker centers were vast and full of variety, and the market again surprised us. There were a couple of stands with some lively bullfrogs and eels, but more lively still were the sellers themselves. We had to be reminded by someone there not to take photos of the aunties selling things - it was bad luck, and they were concerned their spirits would be taken back to the US with us. We concentrated on taking pictures of their goods instead.
Here's a slideshow of food-related pics from Singapore. Unfortunately they're not in a specific order, but we tried to group similar activities or pictures from the same place (we were taking pictures on two cameras). For those who are interested, we did hit a Bourdain stop - Tian Tian Chicken Rice - and there's even a picture of him (though very faint) in the picture I took while Todd stood in line. We tried to hit the Kopitiam he visited too for Chili Crab, but it had just closed the day before for renovations.
